rename files in a folder

tjmannonline · #1 (**permalink**) 11-17-2008

i have a folder that contains 100's of files: abc, bca, def, ghi....

i want to rename abc with 1, bca with 2, def with 3, ghi with 4 and so on.

my way, i create a file.txt with contents:
1
2
3
4
i use while loop to rename my files. without using file.txt, i just want to rename abc with 1, and then bca with 2 by incremental.

wempy · #2 (**permalink**) 11-17-2008

Untested. Assumes that you want to rename the files as found alphabetically in the way that ls will output them.

Code:

NUM=1
ls |while read FN
do
mv $FN $NUM
$(( NUM + 1 ))
done

joeyg · #3 (**permalink**) 11-17-2008

Code:

>ls -l | grep "^-" | cat -n | awk '{print $1","$10}'

That will output a numbered list of files from the directory.
1,afile
2,bfile

etc...
Then just create a loop to read through the output, renaming the second variable to the first.

dennis.jacob · #4 (**permalink**) 11-17-2008

Try:

Code:

ls -1 | cat -n | awk '{ system("mv "$2" "$1"");}'

tjmannonline · #5 (**permalink**) 11-17-2008

this code works: ls -1 | cat -n | awk '{ system("mv "$2" "$1"");}'

is it possible to keep .mp3

example:

rename a to 1.mp3
rename b to 2.mp3

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